Science Nation: Fab Labs

3 minutes

(male narrator)
Explore the Center
for Bits and Atoms at MIT,
and you'll notice
there's quite a bit
of everything
lying around.
It's a tight fit,
but among the clutter,
is a small workshop.
The tools surrounding us
let us make really anything
on any length scale.

(narrator)
Tools, including this
laser cutter and wood router,
make up what center director
Neil Gershenfeld calls
a fabrication laboratory,
or fab lab for short.
Fab labs were designed
to meet whatever challenge
you, as a local community
or a person, needed to meet.

(narrator)
In a Ghana village,
circuit boards
were in short supply,
so kids there made some.
In Norway, herders
were tired of losing sheep,
so they created
these tracking devices.

(narrator)
At MIT they are making parts
for a wireless communication
network in Afghanistan.
To operate a fab lab,
you create a design
on computer software,
then having the computer
tell the lab's tools what to do
with materials you provide.
This is the experiment
I described.

(narrator)
Gershenfeld studies taking
things from the computer world
and bringing them
into the physical world.
Fab labs are an offshoot
of that.

(Lassiter)
To take a slice of what
we do and distribute it,
and see if people
had the ability and access
to tools to make anything,
what would they do?

(narrator)
With help from the
National Science Foundation,
his team spearheaded
an outreach program.

(Gershenfeld)
We opened just one of them,
but it unleashed
a viral explosion
that we've been chasing
to keep up with ever since.

(narrator)
The total cost of all equipment
runs around fifty grand.

(Lassiter)
It's unaffordable
for an individual,
but it's accessible
for a school or community.

(narrator)
The response from users?

(Lassiter)
Leaving that laboratory
having made something
of your own design,
you'll keep coming back,
and that's what's
so wonderful about it.

With help from the National Science Foundation, physicists at MIT have created 35 “Fab Labs.” They can bring relatively sophisticated design and manufacturing capability to people around the world with four simply tools. At last count, they were in use on three different continents, helping to create everything from critical infrastructure to simple art work.